Mary Shelley (30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a sailing accident in 1822. Scholarly appreciation has increased in recent decades for her novels, including Valperga, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and the apocalyptic The Last Man, as well as her biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. The influences of her mother, the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, are evident in Shelley's travel narrative Rambles in Germany and Italy. Shelley often argued in favour of cooperation and sympathy as skills for reforming civil society; this view challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by her husband and the Enlightenment ideals of her father, William Godwin.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

526:

Upon the death of her father Theodoric the Great, Amalasuintha of the Ostrogoths became the regent for her ten-year-old son Athalaric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalasuintha

1914:

World War I: The Battle of Tannenberg resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian 2nd Army by the German 8th Army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tannenberg

1974:

An express train carrying foreign workers from Yugoslavia to West Germany derailed in Zagreb, killing 153 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb_train_disaster

2014:

Prime minister of Lesotho Tom Thabane fled to South Africa, claiming that the army had launched a coup d'état. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Lesotho_political_crisis

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

xerocracy: (informal) Political influence achieved by copying and distributing leaflets and similar material. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xerocracy

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.   --Warren Buffett https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett